The Price Tag of Suffering, The Exploited Lives of Refugees in Camini, Italy

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While working on my senior thesis, I became increasingly interested in exploring the threats faced by refugees and the regime of international asylum. As a recipient of the Klemm Fellowship, an international internship fellowship, I traveled to Calabria, Italy to work on a refugee project over winter break to collect ethnographic data for my thesis. During my time there, I conducted a 3-week photovoice pilot project with Syrian refugee families supported by Eurocoop Servizi Cooperativa Sociale, a social cooperative organization working in the field of reception and integration of immigrant citizens seeking asylum in Calabria, Italy. Photovoice is an activity-focused research method, prompting individuals to identify, represent, and enhance their community by capturing visual representations of everyday life with cameras. My Klemm experience allowed me to gather evidence revealing the complex reality of a refugee, which contrasted to the media’s portrayal of the imagined refugee. The contrasting imagery illuminated how representations of refugees in public discourse diverge from the actual life stories, motives, and qualifications of refugees.